An internationally-acclaimed Palestinian singer has been arrested by Israeli military forces and accused of throwing stones, a charge that could send him to prison for up to ten years or more.

Oday al-Khatib, 22 years old, born and raised in Al Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, was arrested on March 19 by Israeli soldiers who were chasing stone-throwing youths in the area. He is a star singer of Al Kamandjati, the acclaimed Ramallah-based music school founded in 2005 by Ramzi Aburedwan, and has recorded and toured with various Arabic music ensembles in France, Belgium, Lebanon, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Dubai, Algeria, and Austria. (Ramzi and Al Kamandjati form the main focus of my new book, and Oday’s story will be featured prominently in it.)

The apparent circumstances around Oday’s arrest cast doubt on the charges. Oday, according to interviews with his parents, was waiting for a friend on a hill in Al Fawwar, and not part of the group of stone-throwing youths. Jihad Khatib, Oday’s father, told a field representative for the respected Israeli human rights group B’tselem: “While Oday was waiting a group of kids threw stones at some soldiers who happened to be in the area. And when the soldiers chased the kids, it did not come to his mind that the soldiers would go for him. Otherwise he would have run away.” Oday’s mother, in a conversation with Celine Dagher of Al Kamandjati, and his father, speaking with my colleague Anan Abu-Shanab, underscored that Oday did not believe he was a target of the soldiers: “Oday did not run when he saw the kids running towards him,” Anan reports hearing from Jihad, “and then the soldiers came and arrested him.” The family maintains that Oday was waiting on the hill for his friend, with whom he planned to have dinner, and that Oday’s cell phone log can prove that he called his friend just before leaving his house.

Perhaps more significantly, the charges against Oday appear questionable because until now, Oday has never been arrested or jailed, according to Celine. For many Palestinians, throwing stones at soldiers who have invaded their territory is part of a long history of legitimate resistance to a 47-year illegal military occupation. And though Oday’s brothers have clashed repeatedly with Israeli soldiers since at least 2002 – after one brother, Rasmi, was shot in the shoulder in an Al Fawwar schoolyard and lost the use of his left arm – Oday has found his resistance to Israel’s military occupation through his singing. “Oday is not like any other of my sons,” Jihad told the military court when the charges were brought against his son. “He is not interested in throwing stones or getting involved in this. Since he was nine years old he was interested only in music. For you to keep Oday in the prison is simply an injustice.”

Oday, of course, is only one of thousands of Palestinians being held by Israel. According to B’tselem, as of February, 4,713 Palestinians were held in Israeli prisoners, including 169 under “administrative detention,” which allows Israel to arrest and detain Palestinians indefinitely without charge. The penalty for throwing stones can in some cases exceed ten years, and can apply to youths as young as 14, according to a report by UNICEF.

Oday has long been well-known in Al Fawwar as a singer of Palestinian resistance songs. In 2003, he was “discovered” by Ramzi and a group of touring French musicians conducting workshops in Palestine in an effort to prepare the ground for the music school, which opened in 2005. That year Oday began touring with Ramzi and his band, Dalouna, thrilling French audiences with his charismatic presence, wearing a keffiyeh around his neck and singing in his powerful boy’s soprano voice.

Oday was barely 14 when he took the French stage for the first time, looking out from behind the curtain to see nearly a thousand people waiting to hear him sing. Fellow band members recall that he had no problem using his voice as an instrument to cut through the tabla, oud, clarinet and buzouk. He sang The Stranger, his signature song, scanning the crowd to see if he was connecting. “Ramzi told me to sing from my heart,” Oday recounted in an interview with me last summer. “I wanted them to understand my life. I looked into their eyes with a special emotion. They really listened. The way I looked at them, I could tell whether they liked it or not.”

“He created an amazing quiet in the room,” Ramzi remembered. “People were standing there with their mouths open. And for the ones who understood Arabic, they started to cry. Even a French girl, who understood the sadness, was crying.”

On March 13, six days before his arrest, Celine saw Oday singing live on television from Nablus. The occasion was the Mahmoud Darwish award, named for the late Palestinian poet. “We were watching it with Ramzi and I told him it is strange, Oday does not sing as usual today,” Celine recalled. After the concert, Oday returned to Al Kamandajti in Ramallah. He told Ramzi he hadn’t been able to focus on singing, because he kept thinking about his friend Mahmoud Altiti, from Al Fawwar, who’d been shot dead by an Israeli soldier one day earlier during clashes in the camp. Not long before, Mahmoud had noticed that his family and Oday’s were each adding another floor to their houses at Al Fawwar. Mahmoud had predicted to Oday that one day soon, both men would be fathers, and that “we will both have our kids running around the camp.”

“He was thinking of this while he was singing,” Ramzi recounted.

That was the last time Ramzi and Celine heard Oday sing. His military trial is scheduled for April 3. The conviction rate for such trials, according to a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, was 99.74 percent in 2010; in other words, about one in 400 accused was found innocent. If convicted of throwing stones — at soldiers engaged in a military occupation internationally recognized as illegal — Oday Al Khatib, the celebrated singer known throughout Palestine and Europe, could receive up to ten years or more in an Israeli prison.

Ah, but to understand the Crusades you have to rgerad them as a reaction to four and a nalf centuries of unprovoked imperialist aggression by the Muslims against the Christians. The Muslims are imperialist occupiers of once Christian (and Zoroastrian) land. Go home imperialists! Stop the occupation!

When there was no separation bareirr, when Palestinians could fairly freely enter Israel, many of them showed their appreciation for getting to know their Israeli neighbors by trying to murder them. When I lived in Israel, from 1972-75, travel between Israel proper and the territories was very easy and apparently all those years of getting to know Israel did not bring the Palestinians around to feeling of neighborliness.But Vick ignores this because he follows the Bensky Bifurcated System of Middle Eastern Political Analysis which like the Bensky Corollary to Absolutely Everything (which Meryl persists in calling the Exception Clause, q.v.) explains a lot of what might otherwise, to less sophisticated minds, be seen as anti-Israel bias:1. When it comes to analyzing Arab behavior you go back as far as you possibly can. Karen Armstrong, for example, has written that to understand the Arabs you have to consider the Crusades. (My guess is that if I started blowing up underground stations in London because the English expelled their Jews in 1290 she wouldn’t be so understanding, but that’s the Exception Clause in operation.)2. When it comes to analyzing Israeli behavior, history began this morning. Thus it’s irrelevant as to why Israel built the bareirr in the first place and how Israel came into possession of the territories in the first place of course is clearly out of bounds.

It was a rare, bold gesture by an Israeli toward the people of Iran: Daniel Barenboim, the famed conductor and co-founder, with Edward Said, of the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, made plans to bring the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera, which he directs, to perform a concert in Teheran. Barenboim, who features prominently in my new book, #Childrenofthestone, has not shied away from courageous personal gestures. Once, upon receiving the Wolf Prize for the Arts by Israel's Ministry of Education, he used the occasion to denounce Israel's occupation. Later, he accepted Palestinian citizenship. He is perhaps the only person to hold dual Israeli and Palestinian passports.

Predictably, the hard right in Israel (which is more and more the center), attacked Maestro Barenboim for daring to try to play music in Iran, accusing him of aiding and abetting the "delegitimization" campaign against Israel. Undaunted, he went forward with his plans. But then he ran into another group of hardliners -- the Iranian kind. They prevailed, and Barenboim was denied entry into Iran. Thus did hardliners in Israel and Iran (not to mention in the U.S. congress) effectively join hands in their successful bid to ruin a chance for soaring cultural diplomacy. Imagine if Barenboim had been allowed in on his Palestinian passport. Either way - a genuine opportunity lost. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article4542619.ece

Perhaps the most disturbing cost of the #irandeal lies not in the concessions that US and European negotiators allegedly made, but in the sharply increased impunity given Israel in the land-seizing and violence it visits on Palestinians under #occupation. In recent weeks during the Obama administration's fierce lobbying for the deal, the president and others have sought to assure certain Israel supporters that "sometimes even families argue." Clearly the administration doesn't want to "expend more political capital," in the Beltway lexicon, challenging Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

Hence the unintended consequences of the #irandeal: An even freer hand for Israel's land-grabbing policies, and to advocate for greater violence against stone-throwing protestors. And much of this facilitated by the U.S., with "increased US military, intelligence, and security cooperation with Israel to their highest levels ever," as promised by John Kerry.

Already the stone-throwing Palestinian protestors, some as young as 14, face up to 20 years in prison. Now the prime minister of Israel suggests he will implement a policy to give soldiers a free hand to shoot those protestors to death.

Stand up to them by reducing the obscene amount of money, military materials and logistical support we provide?
Israel is not sensitive to international condemnation concerning these actions.
What actions can we take?

Jimmy Carter has come to the conclusion that many of us who have traveled to Palestine for many years have also determined: Israel is not interested in a two-state solution. The reality on the ground is one state -- some with rights, others without. Netanyahu, says the former president, "does not now and has never sincerely believed in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine,” and accused him of deciding "early on to adopt a one-state solution, but without giving them [the Palestinians] equal rights."
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.671056

Sharing this wonderful review of #childrenofthestone, just published, in The Journal of Music (Ireland): "Readers of this magisterial book can make up their own minds, as Tolan presents every side of the argument sympathetically. Children of the Stone is both novelistic and scholarly... Those seeking a human interest story will find the book inspiring; simultaneously and effortlessly they will absorb a crash course in Israeli/Palestinian history, a history that involves all of us because of our governments’ failure to act decisively in the interests of #peace and #justice."
Correction: This post had earlier characterized "The Journal of Music" as a UK-based publication in error.

Friday's horrific arson attack on a Palestinian home by suspected Israeli extremists, in which an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler was burned to death, was, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "a terrorist crime." What he did not say was that the attack on the Dawabshe f…

Sandy Tolan reports and comments frequently about Palestine and Israel. He is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2006, Bloomsbury), which has earned numerous honors and has been published in five languages. He writes frequently for Salon, the Christian Science Monitor and Al-Jazeera English. Sandy and colleagues are currently at work on a 12-part series on global food security and hunger for the U.S. public radio program, Marketplace. Sandy is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC in Los Angeles.